Review: Unsound Music Festival, Adelaide
Unsound Music Festival at Lions Arts Factory and Hindley Street Music Hall, Adelaide
Friday, July 10 and Saturday, July 11, 2026
Winter in Adelaide means the annual Illuminate Festival, of which Unsound Adelaide has been a mainstay of the past decade and more. So, time to brave the cold and rain and warm up to some experimental music. As part of Illuminate, it is interesting to note that for this festival, the lighting is not a main thing, not even really a thing: the tasteful lighting for every act this weekend served to tastefully frame the artists, letting the music speak for itself.
The first night of Unsound is traditionally the more experimental and edgy evening and was held at the Lions Art Factory on the west end of the CBD.
LEYA are a two-piece from New York, with Adam Markiwiez on vocals, electric violin and electronics and Marilu Donovan on harp, but not just any harp – hers was wired up to some electronics, too; very Unsound. Leya presented a series of mood pieces, all slow and stately, with the harp forming an underlying track like a lattice or lace. The tones were not straightforward, with un-straight tunings and dissonance underpinning many of the songs.
The processed violin provided delicate melodies on top, with accompaniment from sounds dialled up from a laptop off to the side. The singing might best be described as operatic or liturgical, with a hushed cry and heartfelt, even pained, emotion coming forth. At first, it was hard to tell if Markiwiez was singing at all, owing to the distance he was away from the microphone, a metre or two, reminiscent of the Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive. His body language was one of twitching muscles, with energy dissipating through his wiry, contorting arms.
For some of the super hushed parts of the compositions, you could hear a pin drop in the venue: a testament to the knowledge of the crowd for what they were trying to achieve and the respect accorded to all the various Unsound performers. Between songs, Markiwiez would take swigs from a tinnie, and his banter with the crowd was political, funny and genuine, and was a gentle beginning to the evening.
In contrast to LEYA, FujIIIIIIIIIIta & Ka Baird brought the bass: big, lurching, thudding bass, with no real desire to stick to any time grid, sounding as if, beneath the stage, the Hulk were trapped in a steel box with metre-thick walls, trying to bludgeon his way out.
Baird began wielding a mic’d-up bass flute, blowing shrill, processed notes then alternating with guttural yelps and shouts, shaking their shaggy mane to the manic cacophony they were whipping up. At one point, they grabbed two microphones, smashing them together then jutting them forward at the crowd: a definite rock n’ roll manoeuvre which fit the music perfectly. FujIIIIIIIIIItaplayed only with a modified pipe and a kind of mallet/brush, all wired up through a small bank of electronic instruments. His stage presence was more reserved than Baird’s, but he also joined in on the whoop-fest later in the set.
The lurching, stop-and-start beats, overlaid with the flute and yelping, created a monster of sound, like a midnight ghost train bound for the underworld. Yet it was not all like this, with quiet and serene parts, or “breakdowns”, you could call them, creating a large-scale dynamic over the course of the set. FujIIIIIIIIIIta and Ka Baird epitomised what is great about Unsound when it all comes together: highly original, highly unusual, and you can still nod your head and tap your toes and bug out to it. A big highlight of the night!
Polish producer 2K88 and two vocalists, Rainy Miller and Bianca Scout, were up next, and although they pushed the envelope for what might be expected, their set never really achieved lift-off. 2K88’s music was atmospheric and ethereal, laid down over minimalistic cloudrap-esque beats. Miller appeared here and there in the venue, including in the central mosh (if you could call it that) area and off to the side of the stage, cowled in an oversized hoodie, whereas Scout was attired in a red leather jacket and was happy to strut across the stage, crooning soulful R&B melodies in the spotlight.
The set really did feel somewhat improvised, with the singers/rappers seeming to have free rein over the music, including some conversation between them when they seemed not to be on the same page. Later in the set, some trip-hop beats showed some toe-tapping potential, with Scout donning an electric guitar, but alas, seemed quite out of tune. Owing to the time of the evening when the crowd was more likely to want to rev than to bliss out, the slow, disjointed set produced a mixed reaction from the restless crowd.
One-half of Armand Hammer (with ELUCID), billy woods was there to bring the boom-bap to close out the night. Woods had a natural rapport with the audience, frequently interacting—especially “Is it loud enough for y’all?”—and delivering a hip-hop masterclass sermon. With only a laptop and a mic, woods paced up and down the stage, spitting out tracks from his recent LP, GOLLIWOG. Because it was just him and the laptop (an increasingly frequent sight for solo artists), transitions between tracks were often rough-cut jumps, but that did not matter once the beats kicked in and the heads started nodding.
The beats were large, skeletal and a bit scary—the perfect backbone to woods’ horror-core style. The volume crept up and up during the set, with woods commenting that this music was meant to be “felt” and not just heard. A raucous conclusion to the first night that sent the punters out into the cold Friday night air with a bounce in their step.
The second night of Unsound saw the proceedings shift to the more voluminous Hindley Music Hall down the road, with its incredibly large chandelier hanging above and multiple levels so that everyone has a good view of the stage.
First up was the intriguing pairing of California-based electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani (featured in a Revelation film festival documentary a few years ago, A Life in Waves) and, from London, avant-garde beat-maker Actress (Darren Cunningham). They sat on either side of a table jammed with electronic equipment, no doubt a delight to the various knob-twiddlers in the audience.
Tonight’s theme was Concrète Waves (Cunningham: the “concrète”; Ciani: the waves), with the music beginning slowly, with swelling, throbbing, repeating motifs amidst the anchorless synth washes, static and clattering noises. Massive thudding beats came crashing in eventually (no doubt the handiwork of Actress). Doppler effect-like synth lines were introduced, pushing and tugging at the senses, all on top of the pounding skewwhiff beats. The set stayed with the underwater vibe, the lighting effects also creating what it felt like to be looking up at the surface from beneath the waves at times.
Subtle jumps and discontinuities in the music were a reminder that this set was live and done on the fly—no “press play” set here. The set had an exploratory feel with dramatic dynamics, and Ciani and Cunningham enjoyed a hug and deep bows to the audience at its conclusion.
Taking the dynamics and certainly the volume down more than a few notches was Lucrecia Dalt, the heralded experimental singer-songwriter from Colombia. Her set featured songs largely from her most recent album, A Danger to Ourselves, which worked for the Australian audience, as about half the songs are sung in English and half in Spanish (most of her discography is in Spanish). Accompanied by a bassist and a drummer-percussionist, her delicate songs wafted through the venue’s voluminous spaces. She had two microphones: one regular mic for the main vocals and another wired up to electronics, which usually featured looped choral refrains.
Opening with no death no danger, she half-whispered the lyrics with the audience settling in to listen to the carefully constructed compositions. The common reader, one of the pacier numbers, featured Dalt on fuzz guitar and got toes a-tapping. caes and aguita con sal were other highlights; their steady pace featured her beautiful Spanish over the exquisite instrumental arrangements. Dalt easily gets the gong for possibly the quietest set ever at Unsound but won over more than a few new fans with her nuanced and deft performance.
YHWH Nailgun hail from New York City, and although similar to Dalt’s band, which featured guitar, bass and drums, the volume and intensity were next level. Performing short and intense tracks of tightly wound structures, drummer Sam Pickard was perpetually in motion, thwacking his bank of roto-toms with gusto, a drummer-watcher’s delight.
Singer Zack Borgone variously hunched, stomped and teetered on one leg like a Karate Kid possessed. His full-throated singing gave the already-intense songs even more urgency, a hypnotic concoction of prog-rock fury. That the words were more growling and shouting than distinguishable did not matter a bit. Both guitars and keys affected a queasy, pitch-shifting tapestry over the top, but certainly in the most pleasant and creative way.
Guitarist Saguiv Rosenstock sprayed a screechy squall of distortion over the proceedings at times, lifting the tracks to new heights. YHWH Nailgun certainly brought the rock, a necessary ingredient over the two nights of Unsound music.
Sometimes, the best is saved for the last, and that was the case with Hania Rani to conclude the Unsound festival. Rani has carved out a unique niche within contemporary electro-acoustic music, possibly only shared with fellow European mega-sta virtuoso Nils Frahm, but tonight her sound was entirely her own.
Surrounded by stacked keyboards, a piano and banks of electronics, she stood with her back to us, enabling the audience to see how she was making the myriad sounds; whether by holding notes on the keys, looping up sound snippets or strategically plinking on the piano—somehow a wall of music emanated from the stage and completely filled the hall. Whereas billy woods was calling for more volume the previous night, Rani’s set was impressively loud from the get-go. This suited the fat, squidgy, arpeggiated sounds of the Prophet synthesiser, tonight’s focus as part of this themed performance entitled Chilling Bambino.
In contrast to Ciani and Actress’s more exploratory, on-the-back-foot stance, Rani was on the front foot the entire set: huge driving synth lines, melodious fragments of sound that bobbed and weaved, then tranquil breakdowns that allowed you to catch your breath for a minute—but never too long before rocketing through space again, with pulsing quasars of sound lifting the whole thing off. At times, the set approached an everything-everywhere-all-at-once maximalist crescendo: exhilarating.
The normally more subdued Rani was positively writhing and bopping out to her tunes for this set, a study in mental concentration that was manifest physically. After over an hour, the wail of siren-like sounds and the crashing of sounds emanating from her rig signalled that the epic set had finally drawn to a conclusion. The gobsmacked crowd roared with applause to some bows and waves from a smiling Rani, drawing the curtain on another amazing and adventurous Unsound Adelaide festival.
PAUL DOUGHTY
Photos by Saige Prime
